"All work and no play . . . "

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[Hi, y'all!] Hi, y'all!

Got a minute or two to spare? Come on in and sit a spell! My other pages are serious. This one is not. It's about things I've enjoyed on the Web. Perhaps you too will enjoy them.

You are visitor number since this page began on March 10, 1999.

All award icons were created by The Corporation, a very fine group of people
who threatened "Big, big trouble" if I didn't give them credit for their very fine artwork.
But they seem to be out of business these days, so I guess it doesn't matter.

A Card Trick

Let's begin with a mystifying card trick. It's really very simple, as are most card tricks, but if you're like the typical viewer, it will take you a while to figure out what is going on.

A Grave Subject

Have you ever wondered about what the burial site of a famous person looks like? Of course, here in Memphis everyone already knows what Elvis' grave looks like. For the others there is a fascinating Web site named Find-A-Grave that contains hundreds, perhaps thousands, of photographs of the graves. Many of the items have maps to show you where to find the graves. I knew of the legend that the original Mother Goose was buried in Boston, and, sure enough, Find-A-Grave has the grave of someone who may have been (but probably wasn't) the Mother Goose of the nursery rhymes. What do you suppose is on the tombstone of Edgar Allen Poe? Yes, of course, it's a raven. And what about Jeremy Bentham's grave? (Don't ask.)

Coke Machines on the Internet

Sometime back in the 1980s some computer geniuses at Carnegie Mellon wrote a program to check the status of their Coke machine, because they were tired of walking up and down stairs only to find that the machine was empty or had just been reloaded with warm Cokes. They used the "finger" operation for this purpose. Now, although you will access it through the Web, the finger program is still called. It appears that the program either doesn't work very well or isn't updated very well, but at least you can still get a smidgen of the "look and feel" of the original Carnegie Mellon Coke machine program. Nothing much to look at, there is an interesting history of the Carnegie Mellon Coke machine that you might enjoy.

The fame of the Carnegie Mellon program prompted a flurry of others. You can find a comprehensive List of Internet Accessible Coke Machines, maintained (not very well) by Bennet Yee. Most of the machines (if they respond at all) are, frankly, dull. There used to be a very good one available from the Netherlands, with lots of information about it, but it is no longer available.

Any volunteers for a Mitchell Hall Coke machine project?

"Live" Cameras on the Internet

Another category of "machines on the Internet" is the live video camera, focused on some object, transmitting either constantly or periodically changing images of that object. Most of the ones I've looked at aren't exciting at all, but I can recommend a few. You might start with one that is laden with significance -- a camera trained on some of the sights in Moscow. Moscow Cam, as it is called, would have been unthinkable only a decade or so ago. Now the whole world can see what goes on around the clock. (The original KremlinKam, which was trained on Red Square, has disappeared.) You must be a night owl in your habits to see it in daylight. Moscow is nine hours ahead of Memphis time, so it's getting dark there just as most of us are getting started in the morning and dawn is breaking there just as most of us are getting toward the end of our day. Unfortunately, the site seems to come and go, so you have to be lucky to find it up at any given time.

You probably would enjoy the Western Wall in Jerusalem and the Miraflores Lock on the Panama Canal. An especially elaborate camera system is Highway 401 in Toronto; there are numerous cameras on that highway, and you can select the one you wish. This is part of COMPASS, a freeway traffic management system maintained by the Ontario Ministry of Transportation. COMPASS also has camera systems for the Queen Elizabeth Way, Halton and Peel regions, the Queen Elizabeth Way, Niagara Region, and the Ottawa Highway 417.

There are several webcams in the Memphis area. There are a couple of webcams at Graceland, naturally (everything's up-to-date in Elvis City). I've never been able to catch a glimpse of Elvis sneaking into the mansion. The cameras take snapshots about once a minute, so he probably does it in the interval between the snapshots. Beale Street Cam, which spies on the famous street in downtown Memphis, must be several cameras, because the viewing angle changes frequently. Channel 5 has two of its own live cameras. The Midntown Cam is mounted atop the channel's building at 1960 Union Avenue, and the Downtown Cam overlooks Beale St, the Mississippi River, and the FedExForum. Channel 5 also has several of the Tennessee Department of Transportation cameras for I-55 and I-40 in the Memphis/West Memphis area. Weatherbug has a "weather camera" in Autozone Park, where the Redbirds play (I suppose they need to know if the pitcher's mound is still above water at game time) and another one at Appling Middle School. Channel 13 has a webcam trained on its "Breaking News" Team. This probably gives you the same view you could get on your TV set, because much of the time the webcam doesn't show anything "breaking."

Here at The University of Memphis, the folks at the Information Technology Helpdesk used to have several cameras trained on themselves. I haven't been able to reach the site lately. I suspect they changed the password because they didn't want any outsiders gawking at what went on there after normal working hours, but I could be wrong. Physical Plant has two cameras trained on the construction site for the new University Center. The more interesting one seems to be perched on the roof of the Rose Theatre, and the other one, to judge from the way the image jiggles, must be perched in a tree near Manning Hall. Some browsers may not be able to see the pictures, thanks to Bill Gates and the geniuses who dreamed up ActiveX controls. If you can't see the pictures, blame them, not me.

To my knowledge, there are no live Web cameras in Mitchell Hall. But, then, what do I know?

There are many links to live cameras on the Internet. Try these comprehensive listings:

Regular Cameras

[Bad hair day] [Bad face day] All of the cameras listed above send images of remote sites to you. Recently Gill Bates and the Misrocoft Corporation released a beta-version Cyber Camera that actually allows you to take your own photograph, using your own computer and monitor (provided they are not more than four years old). The resulting photograph is a bit primitive, but remember that this is just the beta version of the software and it should get better in later versions.

Speaking of photographs, I never seem to be able to get a good photograph. The last time I tried, I was having a "bad hair" day. The photographer told me to come back again another day for another try at it, but this time I was having a "bad face" day. The photographer said I should quit while I was still ahead. They say the camera never lies, but I wonder.

Second Childhood

Winnie the Pooh has long been a favorite of mine. I'm pleased to see that he has a site on the Web: Pooh Corner. You don't have to be a kid to enjoy the "bear of little brain."

Another children's favorite (and another bear) is Paddington. Paddington Bear's official Web site is an enjoyable visit.

The Wind in the Willows isn't very well represented on the Web. The best site that I have found is Jim Seltzer's Willowind, which has a few passages from the book and a few of the Arthur Rackham illustrations. You can get the complete text from an electronic archive, but there aren't any illustrations with it.

Remember all those card games you played when you were a child? The Card Games Web Page will remind you of the rules of all those games and teach you hundreds more. (People who name card games seem to have their minds in the gutters much of the time. Don't visit this site if you can't tolerate bad language.)

Comics

My generation called the comic strips the "funny papers." You can get a lot of the comic strips online these days. Comics.com gives quick access to many of my favorites, including Peanuts, B.C., Born Loser, Dilbert, Luann, Frank and Ernest, and the Wizard of Id, and many that are not my favorites but may be yours. They even allow you to look at a whole month's collection for each strip. ContraCostaTime's Comics is another good site for comic strips. Some of their strips are the same as those from Comics.com, some are different. They generally let you see strips for the previous day or week also.

Virtual pizza and virtual mousepads

Kids love pizza. So do most grownups. Kids love to gross out their elders. Now you can gross out yourself by ordering an online pizza with strange toppings on it, such as eyeballs, fingers, footballs, and firecrackers. The Internet Pizza Server will serve it up according to your order. You can even pay for it online with a special currency. So what if it's virtual money? The pizza is virtual pizza -- no cholesterol, no fat, no calories, no nothing.

What's your favorite mousepad? The one in my office is a miniature Persian rug (Sarouk design). The one at home has a picture of most of my grandchildren on it--one wasn't born yet when the picture was made. (I feel a little bit squeamish about running the mouse over those kids' faces all the time, but what can I do? All the parents and relatives who gave it to me thought the mousepad was a great idea. It was. They just didn't think through all the implications of it.) Adriaan van der Hek has several hundred mousepads in his personal collection and has created the First Virtual Mousepad Museum so that you can see about half of them and vote for your favorite. He doesn't seem to have either of mine, so you can't vote for them, unfortunately.

Other weirdness

If you enjoy line dancing, take a look at several wacky online versions of it. Hampster Dance (yes, it's misspelled -- there's a reason for it which you can probably discover) is weird enough, but you may think a line dance performed by cows, called Let's Get Mooving, is even weirder.

Everybody has heard at least a few "urban legends," those stories that nobody can vouch for personally, but a friend of a friend of theirs told them . . . Perhaps the classic is the "snake at K-Mart," which was supposed to have been hidden in the arm of a coat that a lady was trying on and which bit her. Many of the stories about computer viruses fall into this category. You no doubt have received many messages that warn you not to read messages with certain subject lines because they will destroy your computer. Of course it hasn't happened to the people who send you those messages, but someone (usually a friend of a friend of a friend) has told them . . . Read all about these phenomena in Urban Legends or in the Snopes Urban Legends Reference Pages, or the About.com Urban Legends.

Postmodernism seems to be all the rage in academic circles these days. The trouble is that if you were born in pre-postmodernist times you can't understand a word of it. If you would like to give a try at understanding it, go to the Web site named Postmodernism Generator. The name of the site isn't half as strange as the scholarly articles you will find there. I suspect that many of them are plagiarized from Foucault or Derrida, but I couldn't possibly prove it. The site randomly selects a different article each time you visit it. I've never found one yet that makes any sense to me, but that's probably because of my rigid structuralist upbringing. Maybe you'll have better luck.

Maybe postmodernist writing is just bad writing. Many people who think they are good writers are actually bad writers, and those who think they are very good writers may in fact be very bad writers. Believe it or not, there are actually people who try to write bad, . . . uh, let's make that badly -- I would hate to have people accuse me of trying to write badly. They take part each year in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (where WWW means Wretched Writers Welcome). You don't know who Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton (Baron Lytton) was? Shame on you! Even Snoopy knows who he was. One of his most famous books started out with those immortal lines "It was a dark and stormy night." Bulwer-Lytton probably didn't think he was a bad writer and he would be offended to know that today people deliberately mimic his style to see who can come up with the most convoluted, overwrought, or incongruous opening sentences. Some of them are pretty good imitators.

One of my favorite sources of amusement is mondegreens. What on earth is that, you ask? It's a confusion between what is said and what is heard. The story goes that someone heard an old English ballad saying "For they have slain the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen." Since the dear lady was never mentioned anywhere else in the ballad, he wondered who she could have been and why she is mentioned here. It turns out that the balladeer was really saying "For they have slain the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green," quite a different thing. There is a huge archive of such misunderstandings at The Archive of Misheard Lyrics. Lots of fun here. Most of the entries are about misunderstandings in current popular music. Misunderstanding is perfectly understandable in this case -- I generally can't even mishear the lyrics, much less hear them correctly (nor would I particularly want to). But there is one about the church song "Jesus Loves Me," where the hearer thought he heard "They are wheat, but He is straw."

Remember how everybody worried about the "Y2K bug"? As you know, nothing much happened when we moved over into the year 2000 (the lights at the place I was staying didn't even blink at midnight and nothing stopped working). You might enjoy looking at an animated GIF cartoon about what might have happened.

Why bother with downloading just a small portion of the Internet? Why not just download the entire Internet? (WARNING: You'll need a pretty big hard disk to do this. If you get an error message that you don't have enough space, to return to this page you'll have to click on the OK button or the Cancel button on the image or on the Back button on your browser. If you don't, the program will keep trying over and over to download the whole Internet and will bomb out every time.) It's worth a try. You won't need to download the Internet again until it changes.

Finally, when you have tried all the others, you simply must try the ultimate in Internet experience.

Bye bye! Y'all come back soon!

You are visitor number since this page began on March 10, 1999.